IN BRIEF:

Learning online, anytime

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Bhakti Bapat Mathew June 5, 2013,

Jun 05 2013, 19:12pm ist

updated: Jun 05 2013, 19:13pm ist

Mark Twain said it best, "I never let my schooling interfere with my education." Many of us came to know when we grew in age and wisdom that a significant portion of what we learned in college and in school, found little to application in real life.

This, by itself, would be reason enough to continue with our learning through specialised courses and other educational sources. Add to it the severe competition in almost all career fields, and it becomes clear that we ensure the learning never stops. The best boon for us is the Internet. There are several sites that offer free, high-quality courseware to keep us updated and ever-learning.

University open course ware

How about getting educated from the best of universities without having to cough up the required sky-high school fees? A lot of prestigious universities the world over today offer a substantial portion of their syllabus for free through their ‘open course ware’ sections. MIT has one of the best ‘open course ware’ sections. One can pick topics like engineering, mathematics, literature, creative writing, etc. The requirements simply include a decent browser and a broadband connection. The course-ware is easy to download and read. Other similar university-enabled learning sites include those of Stanford Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University and University of California.

Udemy Courses

The Udemy website offers free courses for almost everything under the sun. And a lot of these courses are taught for free by professors from the most elite of universities. From music lessons to coding, there are free as well as paid lectures available.

Udacity

The USP of Udacity is interactive courses that are offered for free. One can also earn an actual college credit for a fee. The courses are divided into beginner, intermediate and advanced levels. From regular beginner subjects on algebra, physics and computer science, to artificial intelligence for robotics and applied cryptography, this site has it all.

Coursera

Coursera offers free courses from universities around the world. The categories include humanities, life sciences, artificial intelligence, linguistics etc. At present, the site claims to have around 370 courses for students all over the world.

TED Ed

TED Ed is the education section of the prestigious TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) website. The section claims to offer carefully curated informative videos. The categories include Arts and Literature, Social Studies, Business & Economics, Design and Technology etc.

Youtube EDU

The Youtube EDU site combines the best of video-learning. It is a particularly useful tool for those who are more comfortable with a typical classroom format. The section constitutes videos of academic lectures in actual colleges around the world, inspirational speeches and fun, informal segments etc. It also allows teachers to create their own videos and access them later. Videos from universities like MIT and Stanford Business School on topics like computer science can be viewed there.

Online Nalanada University

If you want a one stop shop for all freely available courses from across the world, then the online Nalanda University is a great idea. The portal combines free lectures from various sources and universities and puts them together in logical chunks and more easily accessible ways. They also claim of being able to provide tools for notes-taking, tests and for connecting with your friends on facebook in a virtual class.Make most use of the professional expertise available to you from all around the world. Go ahead and enrol for that free class today.

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